Mercy Read Free Page A

it, was just coming into bloom). Al lie had walked to the back room of the flower shop, where she kept her foam and moss and desiccants, her raffia and wire. She stood in front of the ti ny mirror over the bathroom sink, assessing her complexion. Then, rummaging through a bookshelf, she found her high school yearbook--kept solely for p utting together names and faces that walked into the shop. She let the book fall open to Verona's page. It was much easier to believe that she, Allie, had grown older and wiser, while Verona MacBean, in glossy black and white
    , was trapped in time. It did not matter that Verona had gone on to Harvard and then to Yale, that her first book--philosophy--was the talk of the tow n. It only mattered that in the long run, Allie Gordon had married Cameron MacDonald, which no one in Whee-lock would have guessed on a long shot. On the other hand, it was no great surprise when Verona MacBean became Cam eron MacDonald's steady girlfriend in the fall of 1977, although Cameron w as a high school senior and Verona was a freshman. They were both undeniab ly beautiful, Verona in a collectible doll sort of way, and Cam towering o ver nearly everyone else in the school, his wide, strong shoulders and bri ght shock of hair always easy to spot.
    Allie fell in love with his hair first. She used to sit in the school library bent over a slim volume of Plath's poetry, waiting for him to come through t he double glass doors that blocked off the bustle of the hall. He came in eve ry day during the period she worked at the counter checking out books for the grateful, understaffed librarian. She'd straighten the shelves behind the sp ot where he sat down, imagining her fingers weaving through that hair, separa ting it so the strands that looked like fire prismed off into reds and rangy yellows. At the end of the class period, she would pick up the books he'd lef t behind and tuck them back in their Dewey decimal places, trying to hold on to the heat Cam's hands had placed on the protective plastic covers. 13
    The truth was that Cameron MacDonald did not know Allie Gordon existed for most of the time they had lived in the same town. She was far too quiet, to o plain to attract his attention. There was only one incident in high schoo l where Cam had ever truly come in contact with her: during a blood drive, they had been lying beside each other on the donor tables, and when she sat up and hopped from the stretcher to get her promised juice and cookies, th e world spun and went black. She awakened in Cam's arms; he'd jumped off hi s own table to catch her as she fell, unintentionally ripping the intraveno us from the crook of his elbow so that when Allie went home that afternoon, she realized that Cam's blood spotted the back of her blouse. Allie had trouble convincing herself that the reason they had gotten marrie d years later did not have to do with the fact that after college, they wer e two of the few who had come back to Wheelock. Cam had returned because it was expected of him, Allie because there was nowhere else she really wante d to be.
    If she stood on the bottom ledge of the refrigeration unit for the fresh flo wers and craned her neck in a certain way out the window, she could see Cam'
    s office at the police station, even make out his shadowy form hunched over his desk. It was the reason she'd chosen this particular real estate space w hen she opened the flower shop eight years ago.
    She saw that he was in, not out on patrol, and decided now was as good a ti me as any to bring him his arrangement and tell him about Verona. She crawl ed down from the ledge, rubbing her hands against her knees to warm them up
    , and closed the sliding glass door of the cooler. Absently, she ran her fi ngers over the sweet chestnut and barberry foliage that made up the greens in the piece she would bring over to Cam.
    Allie knew the language of flowers--the idea that every bloom stands for som e quality of human nature. Bouquets